


I Think We Are All Built Out Of Memory

by orphan_account



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: F/M, always-a-girl!Dan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-13 23:18:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5720758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil gets nostalgic about the first time he met Danielle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Think We Are All Built Out Of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> The only explanation I can offer is I was listening to Daughter and with Phil's birthday encroaching I couldn't help thinking about their age-gap. Dan is a girl because... that's what the muse demanded.

When Phil is shown an old photo - or secretly watches a video pre-Good Haircuts - he gasps at the differences between himself and his then self. He laughs at the immaturity, the awkwardness, the dorkiness of their past lives. He marvels at the confidence that noticeably grows into Dan’s shoulders with each year. It seems to him that her posture improves with her hair.

But when the sun’s morning glow is softening the edges it is only too easy for Phil to look over her sleeping form and be transported back to 2009. The ethereal haze of Sunday mornings lends itself to his reminiscence kindly. The birdcalls chime like laughter in Phil’s ears.

She has the most beautiful true laugh. She has her polite laugh, her obnoxious laugh, her sarcastic huffing. But the joy that exploded in her expression when she threw her head back and bared her teeth for the first time, that was what had drawn Phil in. The first time he saw that he knew he had fallen down the rabbit hole.

He had been so nervous about so many things, but through copious amounts Skyping and texting she had somehow weaseled her way through Phil’s defences and into Manchester train station. And the crappy webcam quality had hardly been the most reliable source in the first place but Phil thought to himself that even an old master wouldn’t be able to do justice to the glint in her eye.

And so tall, tall even if she were a boy. Almost as tall as Phil. But curled in on herself, defensive. Phil used to think it made her look mysterious, how she hid herself in her long hair. He eventually came to realise this was her vulnerability. Vulnerable would be a good way to describe Dan in 2009. And Phil was the Big Bad, twenty-two years of age and preying on this tender soul, barely an adult. He was torn up over it for weeks, but eventually couldn’t refuse her doe eyes any longer and agreed to let her visit under his self-condition that he would not let anything come of it, that this was his friend on a friendly visit and that was the end of it.

Of course the second he saw her that condition beat itself against its cage and flew straight out the window. Meeting each other’s eyes in the train station should have been awkward, should have been tense, having never met each other’s bodies yet knowing so much about the mind. But Dan just broke into a smile and ran straight for him, and Phil opened his arms despite himself.

Four years was a long time. When Phil was twenty-one, Dan had been seventeen. When Phil was twenty, Dan was sixteen. When Phil was nineteen, well into a year of drinking and partying and having sex, Dan would have been just fifteen, still figuring life out, still a child. This gap in maturity haunted Phil’s mind. It kept him from responding to Dan’s stolen glances, kept him filling the silences with inane chatter and a constant stream of activities. But even Phil, who often surprised even himself with his seemingly limitless energy, could not keep it up forever.

He reaches to touch her soft hair now, trying to remember exactly how it felt to touch it for the first time, but he had been distracted by their mouths meeting in a hot rush that only lasted a second. She had smiled shyly and immediately hid in the crook of his neck. Phil had never been so endeared. He continued to stroke her silky tresses, fingers running into curls unable to be tamed by her cheap straightener. He sat and gazed out of the glass pod at the city lights dancing beneath them, and wondered at the idea that in all his twenty-two years he had never before felt quite like he felt in that moment, and that maybe that counted for something.


End file.
